If It Aint Broke....

 

You know the old saying, "if it aint broke, dont fix it".  A lot of this pertains to maintaining a golf course.  Sometimes we have perfect weather years and the course looks great and we will do the same thing the following year since it worked before.  No two years are a like and what may have worked before, may not work this go round.

Take our approaches for instance.  They have been mowed by hand for years and always looked great.  However, we could never get them to firm up like our greens.  A big part of it is our inability to dial in watering on our approaches, whatever the surround head hits or the fairway head hits and that is it.  We also need to add some drainage too and continue to aggressively remove thatch.  But one thing that was simple was the hand mowers.  They are very light and often times the operator will allow the machine to bounce and hop around, not giving us a tight or consistent cut.  Yes, there are complaints that our approaches are too tight and we have slightly raised heights.  What if we took a fairway mower, put a solid roller on it to lessen wear from turning in tight areas and put a good operator on it.   After a few days of finding a good way to mow them, we have now embarked on this practice.  The fairways look much tighter even though they are higher than before.  Also, the weight of the mower will hopefully help firm up approaches in the long run.  Of course we will monitor this and if we start to see wear we will adjust on the fly or simply go back to hand mowing.  In the meantime, we have seen an improvement in firmness and need 1 less employee now to do approaches.